Obsession Falls (18 page)
Despite the slicker, the gloves, and the boots, the icy rain managed to touch Kateri’s face, drip off her chin, slither down her neck. She almost turned back, but like Lacey, she desperately wanted to reach the library. The closer she got, the more her sense of urgency increased. She turned the corner and looked across the street toward the entrance.
By the light of street lamps, she could see that someone had left a pile of clothes on the concrete steps. People in town did that sometimes, figuring she would distribute them to the needy. And of course, she always did.
Yet Lacey barked and ran across the street, and she didn’t do that for a pile of old clothes.
So Kateri followed as fast as she could, squinting through the rain and darkness.
No
. Definitely not clothes. Someone was huddled in a fetal position against the door.
God, the whole town was like a skating rink, and this person was out in it?
Lacey reached the pile of clothes and nosed at it, and the person, a woman, probably, turned her head and looked at the dog, then with difficulty extended a hand for the dog to sniff.
That was invitation enough for Lacey. She crawled into the person’s lap and stretched out, trying, Kateri thought, to warm her.
Kateri reached the steps, stood on the sidewalk, and said, “Excuse me? Are you all right?”
Stupid question, but this person should be dead.
The woman looked away from the dog she was petting and directly at Kateri. She was white, young, twenty-five, maybe, and her face was so pale Kateri thought she must be frozen. “I’m fine, thank you,” she said. Her voice was thready, and she enunciated carefully, as if she was having trouble moving her lips.
“I’m Kateri Kwinault, the librarian.” Kateri climbed the stairs. “Come in.”
“Thank you.” The woman
really
was polite. “This was as far as I could go, so I was hoping someone would come along.” She scooted aside to allow Kateri access.
“Of course. And this is far enough.” Kateri got the door open and switched on the lights. It was chilly inside, but nothing like the biting cold outside.
Lacey leaped from the woman’s lap and toward the library, inviting her in. When the woman was slow to respond, Lacey bounced back to her, bumped her, then spun around and dashed back into the library.
Kateri said, “I can’t assist you. Can you come in, or should I call someone?” She knew the woman could now clearly see her crumpled, crooked, broken body, but that was all right. Sooner or later, everyone heard the story about the tsunami ripping Kateri out of the cutter. The massive wave had crushed her, drowned her, taken her to the depths of the ocean. There she had met the god her people believed caused the earthquake. Kateri didn’t talk about the Frog God—everybody freaked out, Native Americans and whites and anybody else who heard—but she knew what she had seen. She knew the pain he had caused her, and the power he had granted her. She knew sooner or later she was going to have to figure out what the Frog God wanted from her. But not now.
The woman tried to stand. She collapsed, then half-crawled, half-rolled inside, as if her limbs could not quite comprehend the commands of her brain. She held one arm close to her chest.
As soon as she cleared the entrance, Kateri hurriedly shut the door and locked it. “I’m going to turn up the heat,” she said. “What’s your name?”
“Summer. I’m … Summer.”
Kateri appreciated the irony of the name. “Well, Summer, it’s good to meet you. Can you get yourself out of those clothes?” Summer wore a uniform of some kind, all black with a black bow tie. “I’ve got blankets and throws. The kids come in wet and cold and when the old furnace breaks down…” It didn’t matter.
Summer stared fixedly at the dog as if Lacey’s enthusiasm fascinated her.
“I’ve got a floor cushion.” Kateri got towels out of the cupboard, the ones she used to wipe up. “Take off your hat,” she said.
Painfully, Summer pulled off her cap and dropped it beside her. Then she halted, as if more was beyond her.
Kateri sat on her walker seat and dried Summer’s short hair and face. She tossed the wet towel aside and covered Summer’s head with another dry one.
“Yes, I can undress.” Summer answered the now-old question by holding up her right hand, encased in a black oven mitt. “If you would get me started by removing that.”
Kateri pulled it off. It was damp; Summer’s fingers were white and looked frozen. She hurried to the thermostat, turned it up, and heard with relief the old furnace wheeze to life. “Can you move them?”
The woman stared down at her.
“Your fingers. Can you move them?”
Summer did, and winced.
“They hurt?” Kateri lowered the seat on her walker, then eased herself down.
“Yes. So badly.”
“Good. They’re not frozen.” Kateri called Lacey, removed the pink, sequined coat, and dried the squirming spaniel.
“Right. I knew that … Water?” Summer whispered.
“Of course.” Kateri let Lacey escape her. She used the handles on her walker to support herself as she struggled to her feet. She went into her postage stamp–sized office, got a bottle out of her private stash, returned, and opened the lid.
Summer took it, tried to put it to her mouth, but her hand trembled too much. She lowered the bottle in defeat.
Lacey trotted to her side and nudged her, encouraged her.
“What a nag,” Summer told her. “Okay, okay.” She lifted the bottle to her lips again, and this time she managed to drain half before taking a breath. “Better.” She sighed. “It’s weird. Water was falling from the skies, and I was dying for a drink.”
Kateri liked this Summer person. She spoke to the dog as if Lacey were a person, with good humor and appreciation for the dog’s concern. As Kateri gathered blankets from the cupboards and cushions from the kids’ section, she chatted, trying to keep Summer’s attention on something besides her condition, trying to warm her from the inside with conversation. “I found Lacey in a garbage heap on the edge of town. I don’t usually go there, but I was out walking and headed in that direction. No reason…”
Except that, like today, I felt some great need nipping at my heels.
“The dog had been hit by a car, was half dead, but she managed to lift her head when I spoke to her. When I dribbled some water from my bottle into her mouth, she nudged me like she’s nudging you.”
“She is so beautiful.” Still, Summer’s words were stiff, as if her face were frozen. “I would never have known she had been hurt.”
Lacey
had
been hurt. She had been nearly dead, until Kateri had touched her, had felt Lacey’s blood on her hands, felt the sad ebb of a life that was ending too soon, and rebelled against the injustice. Kateri had refused to let Lacey die. Now Lacey lived, thrived.
Summer moved her left hand away from her chest. She didn’t have an oven mitt on that hand; she had her fingers wrapped in a spotted white rag. Spotted with …
Kateri shouldn’t have been shocked, but she was.
Blood
.
“Shit!” Kateri grabbed her first aid kit and pushed her walker close. She sat down on the seat and took the poor, abused hand in hers. “Let me see,” she said.
“Careful. Careful!” Summer winced, whimpered, cradled her wounded hand in her other hand, turned her face away.
Kateri unwrapped the rag slowly, noting that it was a kitchen dishcloth, that the amount of blood increased as she got closer to the skin (duh!), and that, thank God, the blood flow seemed to be stopped. She finally wound the cloth down to the point that she could see it was stuck to the end of Summer’s little finger.
And she knew.
She got the scissors out of the first aid kit and began to cut away the extra material. “Who did this to you?” she asked fiercely.
“I did it.” Summer leaned against the wall, no longer blue with cold. Now she was almost green with pain and horror. She pulled a small, sharp, blood-stained knife from her pants pocket, and dropped it beside her. “I was trapped. They were going to find me.
I did it.
”
“My God. Oh, my God.” Kateri chanted the words like a prayer. “Listen. My experience here at the library allows me to kiss a boo-boo and make it better. I can put on a Disney princesses Band-Aid.” She dug in her bag for her phone. “I’ll call nine-one-one—”
With her uninjured hand, Summer caught Kateri’s wrist. “No! No emergency personnel. No doctors, no forms, no names.”
Kateri stared at the young woman. Summer was half dead, but still she managed to be both ferocious and insistent. “You’ve lost a lot of blood.”
“Not a lot. I’ve been cold from the moment it happened. Slowed the flow. No hospital. No.” Summer’s hand slipped away. “Promise.”
“I promise. But we’ve got to have … somebody…” Kateri eased herself from the seat onto her knees. She knocked the ice off the man’s bomber jacket that Summer wore, unzipped it, then slowly, so slowly, peeled it down one arm, then down the other and over the poor, wounded hand.
Summer cried, and at the same time said, “Thank you. I’m so cold it doesn’t really hurt. It’s just … it’s so horrifying I can hardly stand to—”
Someone knocked on the library door.
Kateri couldn’t believe it. “Who the hell…?”
“Kateri! Kateri! It’s Mrs. Branyon. I need that new book. That one … with the guy … and the girl … and they do the wild thing and kill each other?” Eagerness quivered in Mrs. Branyon’s voice.
Kateri and Summer looked at each other in horror.
“She’s like a hundred years old,” Kateri whispered.
Mrs. Branyon banged on the door again.
Kateri shouted toward the door, “The library doesn’t open for two hours!”
Of course, Mrs. Branyon, the most hateful old woman in the world, went into one of her harangues. “Kateri Kwinault, I pay for your salary, and you better let me in and give me that book, or I’ll report you to the mayor!”
Kateri couldn’t believe the gall. In a rage, she shouted, “No! Go home! The library opens at ten.”
Outside, a moment of startled silence was followed by a huff of astonishment and indignation. “I will tell … I will tell the mayor
and
the city council,” Mrs. Branyon said.
“You do that! And I’ll tell them you came out in the middle of an ice storm to get a pornographic book filled with bondage and hot sex.” Kateri’s voice got louder and louder. “What do you think about that? What will your daughter think about that?”
“Insolent Indian. You’re probably drunk and imagined the whole thing,” Mrs. Branyon roared back.
They listened to the grumbling noise as Mrs. Branyon wandered away.
“Bitch,” Summer whispered.
Kateri found herself laughing. “She is. She sticks with the classics. The traditional drunken-Indian insults. They never grow old.”
“Where am I?” Summer asked.
“Virtue Falls. In Washington State. On the Pacific Coast.”
“Oh.” Summer nodded. “I’m going to lay down now.” That was all the warning Kateri got; Summer slid sideways on the wall to the floor.
Shit. Summer was looking worse and worse. Kateri threw three blankets over her, figuring she needed the heat more than she needed to be jerked around to get her out of the damp clothes. “Now … listen. No hospitals, no medical assistance, but Rainbow is the waitress here in town and she’s a genuine earth mother. I’m calling her. She’ll know what to do.”
Summer nodded, swallowed, shook in a sudden bout of shivering.
Lacey whimpered and crawled close.
Kateri shoved a pillow under Summer’s head, and called Rainbow.
Rainbow answered, sounding as cranky as Kateri had been to be awakened. “The café is closed. I’m supposed to be sleeping in. So this better be good.”
“You know about losing the tip of a finger, right?” As Kateri talked, she scooted down by Summer’s feet, unlaced her soaked black leather shoes, and eased them and her socks off.
On Rainbow’s end, the pause was long and profoundly confused. “Yeah … a few of the cooks I’ve worked with have cut off a fingertip, and I did a pretty good job chopping my thumb when I was about twenty. Why? You cut off your finger?”
“I got a lady here. She needs help.”
Rainbow said, “This lady lost her fingertip? You called me because some cook cut off her fingertip? I don’t think so. Kateri, what’s going on?”
Kateri held the phone away from her mouth and spoke to Summer. “Can you move your toes?”
No response.
“
Summer!
Can you move your toes?”
The toes wiggled reluctantly.
Kateri dried them, covered them with a towel. “It’s not just her fingertip. It’s…” She scooted away from Summer and lowered her voice. “Listen. You know I wouldn’t call if it wasn’t an emergency. I’m afraid she’s going to … Can you come to the library?”
“What crazy shit are you into now?” But Kateri heard Rainbow throw off the covers. “Goddamn it, Kateri, it’s cold in here. It’s cold outside. Have you looked out the window? Have you seen the ice? You want me to come out in that?” As Rainbow got dressed, she was huffing like a steam engine. “My God,
you
went out in this, didn’t you? Have you no sense?”
“Not much.”
Rainbow took a long breath. “All right. Tell me. How bad is it, this woman’s finger?”
“Amputated down to the joint below the nail. She managed to pull some skin over the top of it. It … it doesn’t look good.”
“Call the EMTs.”
“I can’t. I promised.”
“She’s off the grid, huh?” Rainbow understood that right away. Respected it, too. “Okay. I’ve got some painkiller. I’ll bring it.”
Thank God for Rainbow. “Just come.” Kateri smelled cigarette smoke. Heard Lacey bark. “This is way beyond my experience. She’s got hypothermia and she looks like…” She glanced at Summer.
Summer, who lay still and quiet, her face pale and her brown eyes wide as she looked into the next world.
“She’s dead!” Kateri cast the phone aside.